New ways to engage customers in co-designing your company's future - a weblog to complement the book, Outside Innovation, by Patty Seybold

Description

What is Outside Innovation?

It’s when customers lead the design of your business processes, products, services, and business models. It’s when customers roll up their sleeves to co-design their products and your business. It’s when customers attract other customers to build a vital customer-centric ecosystem around your products and services.
The good news is that customer-led innovation is one of the most predictably successful innovation processes.
The bad news is that many managers and executives don’t yet believe in it. Today, that’s their loss. Ultimately, it may be their downfall.

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Observations

LEAD USERS

Eric von Hippel coined the term "lead users" to describe a group of both customers and non-customers who are passionate about getting certain things accomplished. They may not know or care about the products or services you offer. But they do care about their project or need. Lead users have already explored innovative ways to get things done. They're usually willing to share their approaches with others.

LEAD CUSTOMERS

I use the term "lead customers" to describe the small percentage of your current customers who are truly innovative. These may not be your most vocal customers, your most profitable customers, or your largest customers. But they are the customers who care deeply about the way in which your products or services could help them achieve something they care about.

LEAD CUSTOMERS AND LEAD USERS

We’ve spent the last 25 years identifying, interviewing, selecting, and grouping customers together to participate in our Customer Scenario® Mapping sessions. Over the years, we’ve learned how to identify the people who will contribute the most to a customer co-design session. These are the same kinds of people you should be recruiting when you set out to harness customer-led innovation.

HOW DO YOU WIN IN INNOVATION?

You no longer win by having the smartest engineers and scientists; you win by having the smartest customers!

CUSTOMER CO-DESIGN

In more than 25 years of business strategy consulting, we’ve found that customer co-design is a woefully under-used capability.

January 16, 2012

Customers Want to Help You—and Themselves—Don’t Waste It!

We have long advocated seeking help with innovation on new products, processes, business models, and relationship issues from your customers. They know what works and what is broken; they know what the competitors offer that is better and worse than what you provide; they know what problems they still have to solve; and they know how they want to get things done and how they want to do business with you. You probably have some ideas on all this, but you are looking at everything from the inside out, and, therefore, are stuck with a limited, self-serving, perspective.

More and more companies are investing in customer-engagement projects to gain the outside-in perspective by launching Customer Advisory Boards, Customer Co-Design Sessions, and including CX and UX methods during product development. Or should we say, companies are re-investing in many of these activities. So many organizations tried to engage customers as advisors in the past but failed to truly leverage that engagement.

In last week’s article, Patty Seybold and I identify the five major internal organizational showstoppers that stand between your customer projects and success:

1. We don’t get the resources we need in time.

2. We can't get quick & easy access to the right customers.

3. We don't have buy in from key colleagues nor proactive support from key executives.

4. We can’t take action on customer-critical issues in a timely fashion.

5. We don’t have measurable/tangible business results.

I find the most frustrating of these to be number 4: not taking action.

Too often, after what seems like a successful engagement, nothing happens. The customers, who willingly and enthusiastically gave their time and brainpower to trying to find win/win ideas for your organization, never hear from you again—at least not in the context of the project. They don’t know if you heard what they said; they don’t know if you’ve done anything about it; they don’t know if you even care. And that’s a really bad thing. It is easy to alienate even your best customers by wasting their time and efforts.

It never really comes down to nobody caring. It’s a matter of focus and priorities. Everyone is so busy and cash strapped that they have a hard time finding the energy and resources to pursue all but the most easily implemented customer improvements. They know that it is important to get back in touch with customers, but, too often, time passes, and they are embarrassed to reach out. And the executives who approved the projects in the first place have moved on to other pressing issues and are hard to get back on board.

But it is vital that you do. Even if months have passed since you worked with your customers—even if it is a year or more—you need to re-engage. Go back to them with apologies for not contacting them sooner, but with evidence that you did, indeed, hear their priorities clearly. Usually, even if you haven’t specifically taken action to work on those customer priorities, others in your company have created and enhanced products, services, and processes that most likely touch on a number of them. Point out that work. Give the customers credit (even if the work was serendipitous). But it is vital to jumpstart the relationships. Especially since you are going to want to go back to them in the future for new engagements and innovations.

Dear Patty & Ronni,
Your analysis as well as recommendations work as well with EMPLOYEES' feedback. Regarding IT systems WHICH they use everyday, especially in service industries, it's critical to set up or adapt the proper loops in order to listen to users's feedback, to get attention from IT and corporate process stakeholders in order to proceed with IT improvements, then to inform back those users that they were listened to, ... well it's exactly the same story, and it cannot work on good will, or quality methods, only.
>>> As you say, it comes very rapidly to a communication issue, forth and back between front- & back-office employees and field management on the one hand, and IT ecosystem vriuos specialists and managers on the other hand (especially painful when part of IT Build & Run functions are spread outside of the core company :-((.
>>> the speed to adapt IT systems is seldom synchronized between projects for customer on-line usage, and in-house usage... Once again, the 2-way communication cited above can help to prioritize and align IT evolutions along customer.com competitive transformations.
Scy -php